]]>If you could find a way to get Billy in as a pitcher,” one of my player’s fathers emailed, “it would really make his day.”

It was a simple appeal to boost a 9-year-old’s happiness. This was, after all, just Little League.

Yet we were into our sixth game, and most of the other boys were invested in our so-far poor results. One mother related that her son was teased at school, and she wanted to know what we could do about it. “Play harder and get better,” I said.

Billy was a likable boy. He was also one of the reasons we were losing. He didn’t play hard or get better. He didn’t make it to every practice or game. In the outfield, his attention would wander, and he’d gaze at who-knew-what in a parking lot or someplace other than where he needed to. (“Billy, game’s this way!”) In the infield, he kicked dirt at his feet. (“Billy, ready position!”) If he was paying attention and heard me, he’d make a perfunctory twitch indicating that he was ready, but one or two pitches later, Billy snapped back to a state of unreadiness. He looked startled when balls came toward him, and on the occasion he got ahold of one, his shoulder and elbow somehow moved in opposite directions. It had to be an optical illusion. The throw itself often set in motion miscues that ended with the other team celebrating.

And now I heard his happiness depended on being a pitcher.

I groaned, anticipating that once on the mound — what choice did I have? — he’d hear the opposing bench’s cheers and his teammates’ quietness as they witnessed him walk batter after batter. “Come on, Billy!” someone would shout from the bleachers. “You can do it, Billy!” Which, let’s be frank, is what someone says when no one, least of all a kid in Billy’s shoes, believed he could. The attempt to “make Billy’s day” would ruin his and everyone else’s. You had to hope no one mocked him at school the next day.

That Billy didn’t see it was one thing. Billy, after all, was 9. But why didn’t his father? “Son,” he needed to say, “you’re not ready to pitch. Let’s practice, and maybe you’ll get there.”

Billy was a likable boy. He was also one of the reasons we were losing.

If Little League is innocuous enough — or not, given the way competition among boys determines status off the field, too — the situation of people who do not see where they stand, their abilities and limitations, comes up quite frequently well into adulthood. Unrealistic self-­evaluations and false encouragement from people who should be candid or know better bring to mind the phrase that the path to hell is paved with good intentions. We’re all big on dreams and destiny and vision, and we latch onto stories about people who, through persistence and determination, proved a naysayer wrong. We like late-bloomers almost as much as prodigies. The message is to not give up. Believe in yourself. Do not let others put you off of your dreams. We are buoyed up by clichés, which begin to obscure the fact that gloom-to-glory tales are fun and notable precisely because they are exceptional.

When eventually we do accept our own limitations, we sometimes pass down our unrealized hopes to children, and nurture them to believe they can do anything, as the phrase goes, they set their minds to — a nice idea that’s often a setup to the disappointment that will eventually come to pass.

A friend who is a professor at a large university lamented the phenomenon among his master’s students. They are educated people by any reasonable standard, and that they’re in a humanities-­related field shows they are ambitious about knowledge rather than just money. But the leap from master’s to doctoral candidates is like single-A minor league ball to the majors, and only a small minority will make it.

“The number of students who don’t see that they’re not up to it is astonish ing,” he said. “It’s not just that they’re applying to doctoral programs when they shouldn’t be. They’re even applying to top-tier schools. You just wonder what they’re thinking that they could overrate themselves so badly.”

They don’t care for being told where they stand, either. One mediocre student asked him for a recommendation for her application. He recommended that she take stock of her strengths and weaknesses. “I don’t know why he hates me,” she told another student. It had to be intensely painful to have slogged that far to realize you’re not going farther, like Moses on Mount Nebo.

In the case of my 9-year-old pitcher, you could argue that there is something worthwhile, maybe even noble, in trying. As the poet Robert Browning put it, “Ah, but a man’s grasp should exceed his reach, or what’s a heaven for?” Well, okay. But grasping when you aren’t even close, least of all when you haven’t really put the time in, is just wishful, if not delusional. A person who keeps chasing an unrealistic dream may feel as if he just can’t catch a break. If you realize your vision is a mirage, do you not change course? Where does encouraging someone, either because they’re not ready or because they’re just not good enough, cross into irresponsible counsel? When is just not trying — in other words, not engaging in futile effort — the better choice?

I suspect that often enough, somewhere in there, the mind and body know. At some point, even if you can’t figure it out, colleagues, customers, teammates, boards of directors, and P&L statements will enlighten you. Disappointment is a grim reaper.

My generation, I think I’m safe to say, made being parents into a verb, and contained within the word parenting an entire lexicon of notions about how to be supportive and foster self-esteem. We were always extremely careful to be encouraging.

We meant well.

Critics called this generation “helicopter parents” because we seemed to be hovering over our children. I think perhaps a better term would be “umbrella parents,” who would stand guard against any rain that might fall.

Protection is one thing. But you can’t forever shield your child from disappointment. It’s inevitable. And I would argue that experiencing some disappointment in childhood is good practice for life’s greater griefs. Disappointment also has a way of directing us to our greater strengths. The actor-director-writer Andrew McCarthy told me once that he’d only started acting because he’d failed to make the basketball team. So maybe the takeaway here is that Billy’s dad could be teaching Billy a lesson rather than trying to press for an unrealistic goal.

In the end, I decided not to accede to Billy’s father’s request. I thought disappointment would be easier to bear than humiliation. I also felt that indulging him when he hadn’t earned it would send his teammates the wrong message. Didn’t their feelings count, too?

There is much to be said for striving for what is attainable. At my local café, I ran into a man of a certain age who had always seemed to me comfortable having made reasonable accomplishments, a man with the wisdom to reach for the attainable and live in good humor.

“How do you feel?” I asked.

“Old, fat, and ugly,” he replied good-naturedly.

“And otherwise?”

“Otherwise I’m all right, thanks for asking.”

He doctored up his coffee with milk and sugar and walked out through the door, his silhouette framed by the white light of a sunny morning.

I wondered if once, 60 years ago or so, he had hoped to get a chance to pitch.

Todd Pitock’s last article for the Post was “Floating Toward Ecstasy” in the January/February 2017 issue.

This article is featured in the May/June 2017 issue ofThe Saturday Evening Post.Subscribe to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.

]]>Call me hopelessly nostalgic, but Halloween was once the stuff of a Norman Rockwell illustration: wide-eyed, giggling children appearing out of the late October night to amuse and amaze their neighbors with their costumes — mummies, pirates, hobos, baseball players, cowgirls, Indians, ballerinas — which had been cobbled together by their parents from items found in the attic or basement. A glowing jack-o’-lantern in the window or on the front steps signaled that there were treats to be had for little ghosts and goblins. Imaginations afire, the tiny tricksters might even spy a witch astride her broomstick, floating across the darkening sky.

No more. Over time, Halloween has been hijacked by grown-ups who have transformed a sweet, homespun holiday into a $7 billion retail monster that, to my way of thinking, isn’t much fun anymore.

Instead of hand-carved pumpkins and a jolly skeleton hanging on the lamppost for decoration, “Halloweeniacs” now compete to assemble the most elaborate front-yard House of Horrors imaginable, complete with ghoulish soundtracks, dry-ice machines, animatronics, and blinding LED displays that can be seen from orbiting satellites. And what is with those hideous inflatable spiders?

Kiddie costumes are no longer clever and original, but banal and predictable: Disney or Marvel movie characters cranked out by the millions in China and purchased by time-challenged parents at Wal-Mart or Target. (According to the National Retail Federation, Americans spent an estimated $1 billion on kids’ costumes and $1.2 billion on adult costumes in 2013. In another NRF poll, only 18.9 percent of respondents said that they would make their own costumes.) I don’t know about you, but it’s getting darned hard to ooh and aah over yet another Spider-Man or Princess Ariel.
And forget dropping a tangerine or an apple — or, God forbid, a home-baked chocolate chip cookie — into little Ethan’s or Emma’s goody bag. Unwrapped treats are now verboten, thanks to spooked parents who buy into urban myths of poisoned candies and razor blades and needles hidden in fruit. These legends have been repeatedly debunked (in several isolated instances, it turned out that older kids or family members put the razors or needles in the fruit themselves in order to attract attention), but they endure nevertheless. In any event, it’s all rather insulting and paranoid. What do my neighbors think I am?

Which leaves you with doling out packaged candy from mass-market chocolatiers like Mars or Hershey, which is not only expensive but also a balancing act. On the one hand, you don’t want to load the kids up with too much sugar; on the other, you do want to give them what they came for. Yes, you could opt for boxes of raisins or packages of trail mix. But have you ever seen the look on little faces when you hand them a crunchy granola bar? Frightening.

Of course, this matters only if trick-or-treaters actually appear at your door. Nowadays, smothering parents keep the kids on a tight leash. Instead of happily roaming the neighborhood in chattering clusters, they are accompanied by a team of adults who assess the situation (could a pedophile or a mean dog be lurking in this house?) and give the kids permission to approach. And more and more, I’ve noticed, kids are carted off to Halloween parties where they mingle with cousins and other “safe” folks. Where’s the adventure in that?

But despite my gripes about modern Halloween, I’ll stock up on goodies and array a couple of pumpkins on the porch every year, hoping that enough little ones — and even a couple of not-so-little ones — will arrive to haul off the entire proffered holiday booty. (With my burgeoning waistline, the last thing I need are bags of leftover Reese’s Cups or Almond Joys haunting my fruit bowl.)

Then again, this year I may just turn off the lights and binge-watch The Living Dead. After all, the Christmas retail season begins the next day. Now that’s scary.

]]>http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2015/10/20/trends-and-opinions/whats-happened-halloween.html/feed3Something You Can Do For the Kidshttp://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2015/10/19/in-the-magazine/finance/something-can-kids.html
http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2015/10/19/in-the-magazine/finance/something-can-kids.html#respondWed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/?p=110589Helping a young person set up a Roth IRA can change their life.

]]>Do you ever wonder if there is something you can do now to help ensure a richer life for your children (or grandchildren)? Here is a powerful suggestion.

The Roth IRA is a remarkable vehicle for saving and legitimate tax avoidance — arguably one of the greatest retirement tax breaks ever created. It works like this: Investments made inside a Roth IRA are free to grow and are not taxed when they are taken out of the Roth account (subject to some rules and restrictions, the main one being that you not take the money out until age 59 1/2 or later).

That all growth on the original investment is tax free sounds almost too good to be true. Some members of Congress thought so as well, and the law includes significant limits on how much of this good deal each person may take advantage of annually. For year 2015, an individual may contribute no more than $5,500 ($6,500 if over 50 years old). Furthermore, there are limitations designed to deny this wildly generous arrangement to high earners. An individual whose adjusted gross income for 2015 is over $131,000 is not eligible to contribute to a Roth IRA this year. (For a married couple, that AGI number is $193,000.)

One more limitation on Roth-IRA eligibility must be mentioned. This retirement account is about “earned income” and nobody is allowed to contribute more than they made from work in any given year. Thus, even a person with significant income from investments, social security, pensions, etc. could not contribute unless he had W-2 forms (or equivalent) showing earnings.
How is all this relevant to helping your children or grandchildren? If a kid has 2015 earnings from work (such as a summer job), he or she may be eligible to contribute to a Roth IRA this year. The problem, of course, is that no teenager we have ever met is going to sink those earnings into a retirement account. Their motivation for summer or part-time work is to meet a hundred more immediate uses for the money. And they intend to spend it on exactly those desires.

This is where you come in. By offering to effectively “match” the kid’s earnings by funding their Roth IRA at least partly out of your own pocket, you can create the best of all possible worlds. The summer earnings are available for spending and the Roth IRA gets funded to the maximum amount allowable. As an added bonus, you may begin to instill the world’s most important financial habits: saving and investing regularly and intelligently.
To say that “someday he will thank you” is an understatement. The very long time frame between now and your teenager’s retirement allows for two amazing things to happen. Money within the account can be invested in the asset class expected to bring the highest return over long periods. And the magic of compounding is free to do its remarkable thing.

Here is an example that I hope will motivate you: Your 19-year-old granddaughter makes a one-time contribution of $5,000 into a Roth IRA, half from her own money and half contributed by you. The investment, on average, earns 9 percent per year. At age 71, she finds that the account has a value of $441,720.85. Make this investment for three years in a row and the value at age 71 would exceed a million dollars. And because it is in a Roth IRA, the money is not taxed upon withdrawal.

It is hard to believe that such a straightforward action in the present could have such a big impact on the financial future of the children and grandchildren you love so much. Believe it. And do it.

]]>Marie Osmond told me on television that she lost 50 pounds eating pre-packaged meals sent to her home, and not too long ago, the nation’s first lady ran off the White House pastry chef. That reminded me of childhood mealtimes and my grandmother’s nutritional malfeasance.

Until well after World War II ended in 1945, I lived on Sixth Street in Corinth, Mississippi, with my grandparents. Two aunts also lived with us. All the men were in the Pacific, leaving my grandfather, called Pop, to provide. My grandmother, Mom, ran the house.

Pop was a superb provider. He worked as a carpenter for the Tennessee Valley Authority and had a green B sticker on his car’s windshield, meaning that we had income and gasoline. He also had a green thumb and grew green vegetables in a huge backyard garden. Pop also fished, and he put fresh bream and crappie on our big dining room table at least twice a week. He also oversaw a backyard chicken house that delivered eggs as well as raw material for the big black frying pan that dominated Mom’s cooking.

Mom was a canner and preserver. We had — in what seemed to be endless quantity — green beans, pickled beets, peaches, strawberry preserves, and goodness knows what else.

Mom supplemented this bounty by going to the tiny Kroger store once a week for meat, which was rationed, and such staples as Luzianne coffee, Domino sugar, Clabber Girl baking powder, and Crisco shortening.

Our main meal, eaten at noon, we called dinner. The evening meal was supper except on Sunday when it became a “snack.” Sunday evenings were Mom’s lone break from cooking.

Many things were served fried: chicken, green tomatoes, the fish caught in Hatchie Bottom, and pork chops. Steak, scarce in wartime, was “chicken-fried.” Meatloaf was baked, of course, as was macaroni and cheese.

Mom always overcooked the steak and pork chops. In those times, the idea of a rare steak or hamburger could disgust entire neighborhoods. A typical summer meal included fried fish, tomatoes, green beans or butterbeans, and turnip greens. Or collard greens. I hated greens more than I hated Tojo or Hitler. If we had salad, it was a wedge of iceberg lettuce doused with French dressing, an orangey liquid unknown in France.

Breakfast might be fried eggs and bacon or cereal. Cold cereals were Nabisco Shredded Wheat, Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, and Kellogg’s Pep, which came with a nifty airplane cutout inside. Hot cereals included Quaker Oats, Cream of Wheat, and Hot Ralston, sponsor of radio’s Tom Mix. We ate these instead of grits.
Modern nutritionists would hyperventilate just thinking about what we ate in the 1940s. On the healthy side were the vegetables and greens that were available six months of the year. From there, things went nutritionally sideways. It’s a wonder my grandparents were not jailed for child abuse.

Can you imagine a germ-laden henhouse in a backyard of today? How about wringing the neck of a chicken on the back steps and then, for the kids’ amusement, letting the headless victim lurch about the yard for a time? Those activities would have had SWAT teams from PETA and the EPA pouring through our front door.

The Department of Agriculture never inspected Pop’s garden, let alone the henhouse, and Mom adhered to no federal guidelines when it came to canning and cooking and cake making. As for fried food, the only questions were, “Is it crisp enough?” and “May I have some more?”

Our house was heated by coal; we drank non-homogenized milk; and we rarely locked doors. It’s a wonder I wasn’t overcome by fumes, poisoned, or stolen by gypsies. Yet we survived. Pop lived to be 88, Mom to 82. Both aunts made it well past 80, and I was 77 on my last birthday.

That’s what 400 years’ worth of fried chicken and beet pickles can do for you.

In an evening dads’ class in St. Paul, a fellow named Paul Archambeau has the floor. He’s different from the other fathers in the room. While most are first-time dads — or have, say, a 3-year-old and a newborn — Paul has four children. His youngest is 3, his oldest is 11. “Now that Ben and Isaac are growing up,” he says, “I long for the days when they would sit at the counter and eat Cheerios with their hands. Norah” — his youngest — “can drive me crazy with some of the things she does. But I just know, a year or two or three from now, I’m going to say, ‘Man, that was fun.’” Another father, Chris, whose son is 17 months, looks surprised. “Why do you long for that?” he asks. “Because
I see being able to play catch …”

Says another: “Yeah, I fight the feeling off every day — I can’t wait until he’s older.”

“I don’t know,” Paul admits. “Maybe the finality to it, knowing I’m never going to get those years back. Or maybe because I’m forgetting how hard it was.”

The group debates this for a while.

“But here’s the thing,” says Paul. “I would bet that if someone did a study and asked, ‘OK, your kid’s 3, rank these aspects of your life in terms of enjoyment,’ and then, five years later, asked, ‘Tell me what your life was like when your kid was 3,’ you’d have totally different responses.”

With this simple observation, Paul has stumbled onto one of the biggest paradoxes in the research on human affect: We enshrine things in memory very differently from how we experience them in real time. The psychologist Daniel Kahneman has coined a couple of terms to make the distinction. He talks about the “experiencing self” versus the “remembering self.”

To read the entire article, pick up the March/April 2015 issue of The Saturday Evening Post on newsstands or …

Purchase the digital edition for your iPad, Nook, or Android tablet:

To purchase a subscription to the print edition of The Saturday Evening Post:

]]>http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2015/03/02/trends-and-opinions/parenting-paradox.html/feed0Our Life on the Waterhttp://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2015/03/02/health-and-family/travel/life-water.html
http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2015/03/02/health-and-family/travel/life-water.html#respondWed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/?p=106897Joy, wonder, and the occasional dollop of paralyzing fear — what it’s like to raise a child with the Pacific as her backyard.

]]>Without warning, our boat made a sharp turn. Instead of riding down the eight-foot swells with the wind propelling us from behind, we were now pointing into the waves with the wind coming from ahead. It was as if we’d been skiing down a bunny hill and a rookie mistake caused us to face uphill and slide backward. I jumped into action.

Our ham radio, which allowed us contact with the world beyond our 40-foot catamaran Ceilydh, also created electronic interference disrupting our autopilot, causing wild 90-degree turns. Over the radio, my husband Evan continued reading out the weather report and recording the locations and conditions aboard the dozen other boats also sailing the 2,800 miles from Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, to the Marquesas, French Polynesia, while I began steering us back on course.

We’d been at sea for 16 days straight, and much of the morning’s radio call was spent talking about where we’d make landfall in 48 hours. Evan and our buddy boats, a small group of boat crews, with and without kids, that we’d befriended in Mexico and planned to sail the South Pacific in loose company with, traded tasteless cannibal jokes and debated the pros and cons of one island port over another (frangipani-scented jungle and towering fairytale mountain peaks versus tropical beaches and exotic villages), while I spun the wheel and adjusted the sails. With growing confusion I realized no matter what I did, the boat stayed facing into the liquid hills, shuddering with each wave impact, while the sails flapped uselessly.

“Something’s wrong with our steering,” I called to Evan. He came to the cockpit and repeated my efforts and then joined me at the back of our boat. Our rudders, which control the steering, are found on each hull’s stern. “I can see this rudder,” Evan said as he peered with me into the hypnotic blue depths, seeking out the rectangular shape, “but on the other side there must be an optical illusion, because I can’t see that one.”

“We can’t see it because it isn’t there,” I said.

“Of course it’s there,” said Evan, who had now leaned so far over the stern that the frothy sea licked at his hair. Worried he’d be swallowed by one of the bigger waves, I called our 9-year-old daughter, Maia, out for the tie-breaking decision.

“Definitely gone,” she said after taking a long look over the side.

Shock was quickly replaced by action. By adjusting the sails and turning on the motor you can steer a catamaran with one rudder. But it’s a bit like a car with one-wheel drive; if the course is straight and flat, it’s easy. While I reported our predicament to the other boats over the radio, Evan began balancing our boat so one rudder could do the job of two. Cautiously we got back underway. I reassured Maia that losing a rudder was a manageable problem, and then to prove it I gave her some schoolwork; French lessons and the geography of volcanoes to prepare her for landfall.

Outwardly calm, Evan and I looked over the charts to pick the best harbor for our crippled boat (a town with skilled welders beat out tropical beaches and exotic villages) and sent out emails to alert the French Polynesian Coast Guard and ask advice. The sea wasn’t flat and our course wasn’t straight; waves knocked our boat sideways and my heart lurched in fear. There was a high risk that our remaining rudder could be overpowered by a large wave and break off. Having one wheel was stressful; but no wheels, hundreds of miles from shore, could lead to abandoning our boat.

To read the entire article, pick up the March/April 2015 issue of The Saturday Evening Post on newsstands or …

Purchase the digital edition for your iPad, Nook, or Android tablet:

To purchase a subscription to the print edition of The Saturday Evening Post:

]]>http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2015/03/02/health-and-family/travel/life-water.html/feed0Cartoons: Baby on Boardhttp://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2013/03/13/humor/cartoons-humor/baby-cartoons.html
Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/?p=82937Advice for new parents? Remember to laugh every now and then.

“Look, honey! The baby crawled!”

“Mother said he was sent down from heaven. They must have wanted a little peace and quiet up there.”

]]>Why Your Great Grandparents Were A Bunch of Spoiled Kidshttp://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2012/06/23/history/post-perspective/great-grandparents-bunch-spoiled-kids.html
http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2012/06/23/history/post-perspective/great-grandparents-bunch-spoiled-kids.html#commentsSat, 23 Jun 2012 13:00:57 +0000http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/?p=62249American parenthood fell into decay 100 years ago, according to this Post article.

]]>Child-rearing advice: The supply is infinite, but the demand is always greater. Americans, it seems, are ever hungry for news on how children are poorly raised, and why parents are doing it all wrong. One of the most repeated criticisms is that Americans overindulge their children.

Here it is in 1912, as written for the Post by Maude Radford Warren.

Our children are spoiled, bad-mannered and ungrateful… in the American home the child rules from babyhood until it marries or otherwise leaves its home… the parents [provide food and money] to the child, asking for nothing but the chance to sacrifice themselves for their young.

Ms. Warren came to this conclusion by comparing the children of the new century to the offspring of Puritans and colonial pioneers.

[The child] learned his manners and his morals by implication and example, though perhaps his religion was belted into him more consciously. There was no colonial parent who sighed, “My child is such a problem!” and no child who said, “My parents are so out-of-date!” There were no filial problems—there rarely are when the problem of getting the food supply is still in the nature of a hard adventure.

In comparison, the average, middle-income family of 1912 was characterized by demanding children and parents who over-analyzed their job.

In our passion for our young—our desire to do right by them—we have raised parenthood to a profession. We are so afraid of not understanding fully that we try to be scientific as well as loving… Some one discovered that the child had rights, and then we began to see that what we were giving him from love we should be giving him from a sense of justice. Our consciences began to work overtime.

The trouble begins with young people who have a naïve faith that all will turn out well for people in love.

They meet; love and Nature throw a net about them, and the world seems to them an alluring and a secure place. They stand up before the minister and the guests and are made one. Among the guests are those who are widowed and divorced and childless, sick and distressed, disgraced and old. The couple see them; but the things that life and chance have wrought for these guests do not touch the consciousness of the happy two. Life is going to be different for them.

And for a time, life is.

[With the first baby, the young father has] parental responsibility without a full realization of what chance and circumstance may do to him.

He will give them a better start than he had. All he has had to give up they shall not give up—not while he has a finger left to work for them.

Being an American, [he] values freedom more than any other quality. When he finds his own quota of it smaller than he had counted on, he at once desires it for his children. The simplest way he knows of measuring freedom is in terms of money. He coins his lifeblood cheerfully.

Perhaps American parents were unrealistic about their children, she reflected, because they’d been unrealistic about marriage.

Parents go on bravely planning and sacrificing for children without dreaming of expecting gratitude—at least, we tell ourselves, not while the children are little.

Our reward is to make them happy; our theory that, if we cannot make up our minds to live for our children, we ought not to have any. We wish to make it up to them because the world cannot be just as ideal as it seemed when the honeymoon was shimmering.

American couples had become so focused on being successful parents—providing their children every desirable object and opportunity—that they couldn’t see what sort of child they were producing.

What the American parent enjoys most of all—unless he is the wise exception—is lavishing on his children things he never had and always wanted when he was little. Nothing delights their father more than to see them at play, surrounded and all but satiated with toys.

Of course, [the father] idolizes these children and overrates their importance. He may know they are rude and tiresome, only ordinarily intelligent and not at all diligent; but he cannot feel this.

Ms. Warren works on the same parental concerns that journalists still use today: parents’ uncertainty and resentment, the worry that they do too much, the suspicion that more discipline and limitations for the child would make everything better.

There has been practically no one to tell us that, if we give the child his rights and develop his individuality, the rights of the parent may have to be small. Perhaps a faint piping voice is raised now and again on behalf of the parent, but it is soon smothered.

And there are constantly increasing numbers of teachers and writers to tell us how to maintain the rights of the child. Sometimes, when the doctrine is translated into action, its results are of the sort that would have made the early settlers gasp and reach for a rod, with which to put the fear of the Lord into a child.

Mother wishes to be a competent parent. … She goes to classes to find out what her children should read and how to discipline them, avoiding that dreadful danger of waiting until they do wrong and then colliding with them. Plenty of people tell her what she should do, but no one warns her that in respecting the individuality of the child she may lose her own.

Like many articles on the continuing crisis in parenting, “The Decay Of The American Parent” (Sep 14, 1912) starts with sensation and ends in moderation.

Fortunately we are not all decayed parents. Plenty of us have struck the balance between self-abnegation and folly between indulgence and severity. Many of us have adapted the pedagogy of the schools to our own individual needs, throwing away what is stupid or valueless and digging into our own imaginative resources to make the naughty conduct of our children react on their own heads.

And even when we are handling our children badly—even when we have decayed as parents—from the ashes of us spring our young, who, as parents, will profit by our particular mistakes.

Ms. Warren would probably recognize the endless stream of expert advice for parents, though she might be surprised that the extremes range from ‘Tiger Moms’ to Attachment Mothering.

She probably wouldn’t recognize how much the world of the child has changed in 100 years. For the most part, they get the food, clothing, and shelter they need, but Security and Hope are less abundant today than five generations ago.

They cope with endlessly revised school curricula, drugs, violence, rapid and continual changes in technology, and a formidable challenge in escaping the pull of childhood and dependency when 85% of college graduates move back in with their parents for lack of ready work.

]]>Because Jean and I have five kids, one of whom now has three little boys of her own, we take more than a passing interest in Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. One year, when my kids were younger, the National Father’s Day Committee actually called to advise me that I was being named one of their “Fathers of the Year.” I wrote a poem about it, which went like this:

I confess to a certain pride
That I won’t attempt to hide.
I’ll admit that it delighted me to hear
That the Father’s Day Committee,
Which is based in New York City,
Has named me one of the Fathers of the Year.

No, it’s not the least bit bad
To be honored as a dad.
Although, you may wonder what I did to win it.
If you ask how I do it,
I will say there’s nothing to it.
To explain it now will only take a minute.

It is absolutely true
That there’s nothing that I do
To make the Father’s Day Committee name me.
It all has to do with Jean
And five kids named Kathleen,
Winston, Annie, Emily, and Jamie.

Three lasses and two laddies,
I’m the luckiest of daddies.
They are wonderful as any kids could be.
And though often I’m not there,
They can hear me on the air
And also see me there on the TV.

I’m sure Jean was pleased to hear
That I’m Father of the Year.
It must thrill her as she goes about her life
To be informed that I am such a splendid guy—
And she’s the Father of the Year’s wife.

Every morning she gets up
To a day that never lets up
To pack lunches for the kids to take to school.
She does that every day,
Although I am far away.
I’m long gone to work by that time,
As a rule.

Yes, it must seem really keen.
I’m sure it must to Jean.
It must fill her with satisfying cheer
To hear that in the city
The Father’s Day Committee
Has picked me as a father of the year.

When she drives them all to school,
Trying hard to keep her cool,
As the rush hour traffic slowly moves along,
She must give a little smile
At this little daily trial
And wonder if she’s doing something wrong.

She tends to them when they’re sick;
When they’re hurt comes running quick.
It is she who helps them with the violin.
I would do it if I could,
I am certain that I would,
Were it not that I am very seldom in.

It is Jean who drives them places,
And makes sure they wash their faces,
And finds their missing jackets and their shoes.
It is she who does it all,
While yours truly has the gall
To be off somewhere gathering some news.

Jean breaks up each fight,
Reads stories every night,
And when they have troubles, takes time to hear.
She does that, truth to tell,
And she does it all so well.
That’s why they named me Father of the Year.

I eagerly await, any day now, a call from the National Grandfather’s Day Committee. Jean will be so pleased.